


Shared trauma

by datfearlessfangirl



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: F/F, F/M, Hurt No Comfort, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Panic Attacks, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Suicide, seriously guys please be careful
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-08
Updated: 2020-04-27
Packaged: 2020-08-16 02:48:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,083
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20170072
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/datfearlessfangirl/pseuds/datfearlessfangirl
Summary: Hawkins is more than a place, they were beginning to learn.





	1. More Than A Place

**Author's Note:**

> You guys ever wanted a fic that rips apart your soul? Me neither, but here ya go. Here's some angst I wrote at 4:00 AM that I might continue. At least, I plan to continue it.

Mike and El moved in with each other. It was an unspoken promise, a way to leave Hawkins behind them. Who were they to know that Hawkins wasn't just place they could run away from? Who were they to know that it had latched onto them, ready to suck them dry until they were left broken and empty?

The nightmares were common for both of them. Mike recalled one night where he called up Nancy, delirious and desperate. El found him not long after, his hair plastered to his face from sweat, sobbing and begging the empty room for someone to pick up. To this day, he hasn't told her what he dreamt of that night (and he never told her afterwards when the same nightmare snuck up on him, clawing at him…). It was worse when he woke up to El's screams at night. He hated how he was almost used to the sound at this point.

But life goes on doesn't it? Mike found a job at a startup. It was a huge risk, but he took it anyway, toiling and making a living (he ignored how he froze every time someone used a coffee machine, the mechanized whirring sounding too much like the growl of a demogorgon). El seemed to be doing fine, having found she had a talent for singing and landing gigs here and there (what she doesn't tell him is the story of how she slammed a man to a wall because he ran up behind her to ask for directions, how she almost forgot to breathe when the lady on the bus tapped her shoulder).

And the nights spurred by passion, when their bodies merged in desire, they always felt like the last. And it was worse when Mike held on too tight, when El's screams weren't the good screams, when they were pleas for Mike to get off (which he obliged). It worse worse when it turned into one comforting the other.

Even after they had their daughter, (Mike swore he would be the father to her that he wished his father was to him the night she was born) Mike felt nothing but fear when she showed signs of her burgeoning powers. He didn't sleep at all, instead frantically recounting how her life is going to turn out just like theirs (and so he fulfilled his promise, supporting her through every startling discovery of her abilities, hugging her tightly and telling her he loved her when she confessed that she didn't like boys like every other "normal" girl, and smiling brighter than the stars and the sun when she brought home her girlfriend).

Because the memories never leave. They're etched into the tiny corners of Mike's mind. They were the worst monsters he had faced, beyond demogorgons and the mind flayer. It was the monster that consumed you from the inside out. The monster that reminded him that he wasn't done fighting. Even when he finally got his happy ending with El, when the future seemed bright and bold and bursting with promise, he wasn't done fighting.


	2. Watching

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Steve only ever could just stand by and watch when things went wrong  
Warnings for this chapter: Suicide, PTSD

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *reviving this story from the dead*  
Oh shit whaddup  
Yeah, this chapter gets pretty serious and has some really heavy stuff. I recommend you proceed with caution while reading  
I love Steve a lot, hence why I am subjecting him to this kind of torture.

Most of the time, Steve felt like a spectator, watching in on the action as everything crumbled around him. He watched as Nancy and Jonathan defeated the demogorgon. He watched as Mike, Max, Dustin, and Lucas (they were all so young, now that he thought back on it) tried to draw the mind flayer away from Eleven.  
He really only felt useful the first time he won a fight. The adrenaline of knocking a Russian spy out coming down and the realization that he had done more than just stand around like an idiot. Beyond that, he was just Steve, the fallen king of Hawkins High School. Steve who was too caught up in his own fantasy to actually do something with his life. Steve who never left Hawkins. Stupid, pathetic, idiotic Steve Harrington.  
He watched as Robin headed off to college once the summer ended. Some fancy liberal arts college in New York that Steve hadn’t heard of but was apparently a big deal. She promised to send postcards (she sent him a few and he had written back as much as he could. The last he heard from her, she had moved in with a girl she liked).  
He watched as all of the party members moved out of Hawkins and onto new lives. They never bothered to visit him. Not that he blamed them. Why come see someone who barely helped at all (he couldn’t deny that it hurt, they were all like family to him, siblings he never had)? Dustin still tried to call him regularly, but “regularly” meant every three months when he remembered Steve’s existence.  
He watched when people left Hawkins in droves after all the negative publicity from the Cutting Edge episode. That left all of the old people and deadbeats behind. It didn’t take a genius to figure out which of those categories Steve fell into.  
His hair lost its luster after several years of half-hearted care. He couldn’t bring himself to care. Part of him felt like he was shedding the last of his “King Steve” title, something that only served to remind him how far he had fallen. Not to mention the nightmares that would plague him every night. Horrible images of Robin being tortured until her last breath. Waking up in a cold sweat and hugging himself, forcing his brain to remember that Nancy wasn’t killed by one of the mind flayer’s spies (he had yet to actually witness the sickening forms of flayed skin and bones that Nancy described those people had turned into, resigning himself to whatever gruesome images his mind conjured). His nightmares always had one commonality: he was always too much of a coward to actually do something.  
Not too far off from reality, he supposed.  
The years passed by in monotony. Steve was in his 40s when the arcade closed down. By then, nothing much was left of Hawkins anyways. He should have taken this as his cue to move on, to leave this town behind, and fix things.  
But Steve just kept watching. Watching as the one place he’d lived in his whole life faded into a memory of old buildings and small suburbs. Watching as his feet carried him to the cliff overlooking the lake (they made it seem like Will had drowned here). Watching as he stepped off the edge and plummeted toward the depths of the lake.


End file.
